Hunter’s Top Games of 2024

2024 has been a rollercoaster year for games. Quite literally: There was a peak at the start of the year, a valley in the summer, and then another peak later. It wasn’t so bad though. The summer dip allowed me to finally get the Elden Ring and Red Dead Redemption 2 monkeys off my back. And allowed for another replay of Dragon Age: Origins. So I really can’t complain. But we’re not here to talk about all of the old games I played this year. Let’s take a look at my favorite games of 2024.

6: Hellblade: Senua’s Saga

Image Credit: Ninja Theory, Microsoft

Senua’s Saga was my most anticipated game coming into this year. At least as far as games I knew were going to be coming out are concerned. The first game was rather important to me so I had a built in curiosity for the sequel. The first game was relatively self contained so I was wondering what they were going to do. I think Ninja Theory pulled it off swimmingly. 

I think this game did a good job at taking what worked from the first game and finding a way to elevate it. For example: I think that the combat in this game is about the same as the first one from a mechanics standpoint. However, the way it's presented with the new animations makes everything feel so much more visceral. Every successful dodge felt like Senua was a hair’s breadth from being cut open. Every missed parry had the full weight of the enemy’s strike driving her down to one knee, and all of Senua’s attack animations are these wild swings that make it look like she was possessed by a demon. 

The story felt like a solid step forward from where the first game left off. Seuna’s Saga acts as an interesting thematic companion to Senua’s Sacrifice. Sacrifice was focused pretty singularly on Senua and her trauma. Saga is about Senua carrying that trauma forward while still being able to live. We get to see how Senua interacts with other people in real time, rather than just in flashbacks. One of the main themes of the game is how all monsters began as people. A major part of Senua’s trauma was being ostracized and treated as a monster for how her psychosis makes her see the world. So one of the aspects that the story explores is what sets Senua apart from the creatures she encounters and how she could have turned out to be like them. 

Overall I think Senua’s Saga turned out excellently. The game committed to a vision and I believe that it brought that vision to life spectacularly. As it is, all of the elements of the game synergize wonderfully.  Combat encounters set up by dramatic story moments still felt intense because of the incredible way they were presented. The impressive visuals, sound design and performances all brought to life another emotionally captivating chapter in Senua’s story. 

5: Astro Bot

Image Credit: Team Asobi, Playstation

Astro Bot is like a shot of joy being shot directly into the bloodstream. I really enjoyed this game. It does such a great job at paying homage to the legacy of Playstation while also firmly being its own thing. Astro’s basic moveset is fun to move around with and the level design does a really great job at enticing you to explore. I am not the sort to 100% if I am not feeling it and Astrobot motivated me to look for everything it had to offer. Whether it was the puzzle pieces, Playstation themed Astro’s, or secret level. 

In addition to Astro’s basic moveset being plenty of fun, the game does a good job at introducing power ups to use throughout the level. The Bulldog rash added a dash maneuver. There was a vacuum type backpack that let you suck up tree sap and make bouncy platforms elsewhere. I really enjoyed the Sponge power up. Passing into water would cause Astro Sponge to inflate and you could go and expel the water over to put out fires. I think another one that was excellent was the Mouse power up. It changed the entire perspective of the level and does really cool things with the perspective switch. 

I think something the game does excellently is the balancing act with the power ups. It would be easy for it to feel like an ability out stays its welcome or shows up too much. What the game does instead is take each aspect of an ability to its logical conclusion. If the power up shows up again, it will be used in a different way. 

The boss battles that come at the end of each world were all very enjoyable as well. They manage to feel like an extension of the platforming rather than a hard pivot to something completely different. The special levels were also quite enjoyable. After each boss battle you get a level that is inspired by one of Playstation's other classic IPs. Each one did a great job at taking the spirit of the game in question and bringing it to life with Astro’s charm and whimsy. 

I hope that Astrobot being so good serves as a wake up call to Sony and the Triple A space in general. If the game is fun and is made with care, it doesn’t have to go through a tortured development cycle, cost millions of dollars, or be at the bleeding edge of technology. Astro Bot is a fun game powered by creativity and joy at that’s all it needs to be.  

4: Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth

Image Credit: Square Enix

I played this game twice this year. That is a whole lot of Final fantasy 7. With the exception of the last couple of hours, it is still one of my favorite experiences of the year. In general I think Rebirth did a great job of fine tuning the foundation that Remake laid. The combat is a good example of this, you can do aerial combos now which makes it so much easier to keep the pressure on enemies. 

The biggest departure that Rebirth introduces is the way the game is structured. Rebirth is a way more open experience than Remake was. There are a lot more side quests and extra activities. These extra activities are hit and miss. Some side quests would be more of an investment than I was willing to put in but others would do a great job at adding life to the world and showing us more fun interactions with the characters. The minigames were the same way. Some would be great like Queen’s Blood and some of the others were bootleg Rocket League.

The story of Rebirth is hit and miss. The ending stumbles and certain parts overstay their welcome but I still liked it for the most part. I think that this version did a great job of using the arcs of the characters to work as the connective tissue between the major story beats. A good example of this would be the Junon chapter. The whole tone of why the group is at the parade changed for the better in this version. I would say the same as the Dust Bowl segment beneath the Gold Saucer as well. 

My favorite thing about Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is the cast. They do a great job at giving everyone time to shine. The game also manages to do it in a way that feels consistent rather than making each character hold the attention ball for their turn and then fade into the background for the rest of the game. I also love the dynamic the main party has with each other. Barrett and Yuffie play off of each other really well. I also enjoyed Aeris and Tifa’s friendship throughout the game. 

All together I think that Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth is an enjoyable game. When I played it the second time around there were a bunch of instances where I thought “Oh man I can’t wait to get to this part” while I was playing. Rebirth has one of the most enjoyable casts I’ve encountered in a video game and the gameplay and story served as a wonderful vehicle for their adventure. 

3: Silent Hill 2

Image Credit: Bloober Team, Konami

I have never been happier to be wrong about a video game. I said last year that Hi-Fi rush was the biggest surprise of 2023. I’d wager that Silent Hill 2 Remake is my biggest surprise of 2024. If you’ve been following the podcast for the past couple of years you’ll know that my expectations for this game were so low they may as well have been buried. But to the chagrin of Ethan and Kyle, who really wanted to witness me viscerally hate something, the Silent Hill 2 remake was fantastic. 

The game stays pretty faithful to the main story. There are a couple new scenes and a few extra endings but they all feel pretty consistent with the rest of the game. I don’t think I’d be able to tell what was new and what wasn’t if I had not played the original version. The new takes on the characters were pretty good for the most part. I think James, Angela, and Eddie all come off really well in this incarnation. The only one I think was a bit of a miss was Maria. I just don’t think they made her out to be “off” enough. She’s supposed to be like what would happen if James looked at Mary through a bizzaro mirror and most of the time she really does just seem like “Mary but with pink hair”. 

Gameplay wise Silent Hill 2 takes a 3rd person behind the back camera perspective. The combat is balanced pretty well. Very often I would feel like I was swimming in health supplies and ammo, only to feel like I was barely getting by after a few encounters. Your entire situation could change on a dime and I think that did a great job at building the tension. The areas were all designed really well. I felt like I managed to familiarize myself with all of the locales properly before moving on to the next thing. The sound design, creature design, and music all did an excellent job at curating a foreboding atmosphere while also drawing out my desire to explore as if it were a siren’s call. 

It's honestly very impressive that this remake is as good as it is. Back in 2001, games didn’t cost nearly as much to make. So the PS2 version of Silent Hill 2 could tackle its more difficult subject matter and be the weird arthouse fever dream that it was and still make its money back. Games cost substantially more to make these days so it would stand to reason that a lot of the uncomfortable subject matter and other weird aspects of the game would be scrubbed from the remake to make it more palatable to a wider audience. Thankfully, not only were those aspects still present, they were handled respectfully. So thumbs up to Bloober Team and Konami for that one.

2: Crow Country

Image Credit: SFB Games

Crow Country rules. I don’t think I knew just how much I was going to like it when I played it the first time, but here we are. I also played this game twice this year. It’s certainly not as impressive as two Rebirth playthroughs, but it is important because that second playthrough really reinforced the experience for me. In a lot of ways this game is similar to how I saw Sea Of Stars last year. Where you can see its inspirations in every corner of what it's doing, but it does such a great job of making those elements its own that it doesn’t matter. 

The game is styled after the PS1 era of survival horror games but it has a bunch of helpful quality of life features to make it friendly to genre newcomers. For starters: At first blush it may look like it has the typical fixed camera pre rendered backgrounds that you would expect a game like this to have. In reality, you are actually able to move the camera around. Your inventory isn’t locked to a set number of 6-8 item slots. All of your ammo types get their own stack in the inventory and have their own limits to how much you can carry. 

The combat does a good job at being tense without being frustrating. Ammo drops frequently but it's balanced by the max capacity not being that high, so I had to go through my supplies just as quickly as I was getting them in most cases. Enemies would come at you en mass pretty often but there would be an abundance of hazards in the environment for you to take advantage of. This is all helped by the fact that the actual shooting mechanics of the game are a free aiming system rather than a hard lock on where I have to try and tilt my aim upwards for a headshot. The ball was in my court not to be bad at the game, rather than the game being frustrating because of its controls. 

Crow Country has such a cool aesthetic. It perfectly captures the old PS1 block visual style while bringing the actual visuals forward enough to make it really cool to look at. The environmental backdrops are all quite detailed and the character models looking like toy figures gives the game a lot of charm. The setting itself is also incredibly atmospheric. Abandoned theme parks are inherently filled to the brim with atmosphere and I think it is a rather underused setting for horror games. 

I really enjoyed the story of Crow Country. It hits on a theme of greed and the uncertainty of the future in a way that I really enjoyed. The game does a really good job at using the memos and other documents to provide a solid bread crumb trail for the mystery. Mara was a great protagonist and I really enjoyed her inner monologue throughout the game.  The game also took a few twists that I wasn’t expecting. Overall, the gameplay and story provide a fun and foreboding ride through a truly excellent setting to create an exciting experience that I will continue to think about for a long time.

1: Dragon Age: The Veilguard

Image Credit: Bioware, Electronic Arts

There is something rather amusing about my mentality before Dragon Age’s re-reveal and how I was feeling after it. Before the first trailer they showed off this year I was saying to myself “It’s okay if it's bad, you still have the other games and Baldur’s Gate 3 now” After the game was revealed, it was like jumping into a cold pool.I had spent so long thinking that the next Dragon Age game was years away that I just pushed down whatever excitement I would generate. The trailer they showed wasn’t even very good, but all of the Dragon Age neurons in my brain activated. I very suddenly wanted to be back in Thedas as soon as possible. I listened to one of the books at work, and even replayed Origins. 

Once the game finally came out I was not disappointed. Let’s start with the combat and general gameplay loop. I found it to be the most engaging in the series. It takes a much more action RPG kind of approach but I don’t really mind. Each element of the combat really fed into itself. My meter was generated by hitting attacks in succession without taking damage. Things like perfect dodges or perfect parries would give me a meter boost as well. There was finally an active part for me to play while I waited for my abilities to recharge. I had to play well in this risk/reward kind of playstyle to succeed. 

There were so many options in the skill grid that really fed into the risk reward kind of style that I was playing. There was one that would buff how fast my meter generated once I got so many hits in a row but it would fade if I took a hit. Eventually I was able to stack that buff and create a bit more leeway for myself. When you combine this with the status moves you can inflict and detonate with the help of your companions it makes for a really fun time combat wise. 

The game also did a great job with the exploration. Not in the vast expansive “ I want to climb that mountain in the distance" kind of way but in the “There is something around here and I want it” kind of way. Anytime you’d run by a chest with a weapon or armor in it, there would be a little blinking icon next to the map. It had just enough presence to let you know it was there while also being easy to ignore if you didn’t feel like looking for the extra goodies. 

I rather enjoyed the game story wise too. Once I got over the initial weirdness of Thedas being ten years removed from how I left it, I found that there was a lot to like. The main quest did a great job delivering bombastic high stakes moments and I feel like the side content was substantial enough to get me invested into the major areas I was traveling between. The side content was so good I was as invested in some of the key players there as I was in the main party. 

I liked the main party in this game quite a bit. I’d say that this is the group where it feels like everyone involved is pretty good friends with each other. The other game had pockets of people that felt like they were pretty good friends but it never felt like the energy was spread that way throughout the entire group. Everyone had a solid personal quest too. Each involved them being split between two different paths or identities and coming to terms with which one they wanted to embrace. My favorite companions throughout the game were Neve, Harding, and Emmerich. I also really like Rook as a protagonist. I think being a little intellectually dim, but emotionally intelligent makes Rook an excellent foil to Solas. 

I think the triumvirate of antagonists was solid in this game too. Solas works perfectly as the scheming “Enemy of my enemy” kind of guy where you are just waiting for the other shoe to drop. Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain kind of have a Megabyte and Hexadecimal thing going on. One is very much “I will crush all who oppose me” and the other one wants to peel away different strips of your skin for science experiments. They both provided a lot of gravitas to the proceedings whenever they showed up. 

I loved Dragon Age: Veilguard, I get why some fans wouldn’t like it as much as other entries. Each game has its own set of advantages and drawbacks. Veilguard doesn’t have the political intrigue that Origins and Inquisition did. Rook is way more of a predetermined character so you can’t roleplay them as evil if you wanted to. However, it also has the most engaging combat in the series, and Rook being more defined allows them to be more expressive. The important thing to me is that it delivered on an enjoyable cast of characters that I was able to get invested in. And the setting and plot worked as a great vehicle to deliver the story of those characters to me.